LIFE WITH A CAPITAL "L" Chapter SIX, sec. FOUR

SURPRISE: Real People Make Mistakes

Real people let go. They laugh a lot, and they love life when they do. They are not guilty of treating surprise, incongruity, or mishap as evidence of personal failure. Mistakes score our adaptability and, if handled well, make us bearable. 

Small example: my friend who entered the wrong restroom in a restaurant. She swiftly retraced here steps saying, “Oops, a woman’s restroom just doesn’t have those cute wall fixtures.”

What a surprise! And what a gift to those of us who were with her there. Her “mistake” allowed us all to get healthier as we nearly rolled under the table recalling wrong restroom moments. All people make mistake, but real people have great fun with them. Well, with some of them.

I have made major mistakes. I mean, major, the sort not at all immediately funny. Some, never so. There are mistakes that simply cannot jump the fence into funny. But I am also old enough now to realize that there is little that does not eventually slip into humor’s yard. The Holocaust does not. Drunk driving does not. Drunks may do some funny things, but drunk is not funny. But perhaps it is not fair to place those things in the category of mistakes. A mistake is an error in action, calculation, opinion, or judgment caused by poor reasoning, carelessness, or insufficient knowledge, etc.

Deliberate cruelty or evil is not a laughing matter but mistakes nearly always become so. I wish, as a first soprano in a choir concert, I had not bellowed out an entrance one-fourth of a beat before the sheet music beckoned voices. I wish that especially for my friend Karen the choir director, and for her husband as well, who so expertly recorded it all. But, enter early, I did. And that mistake, much sooner than I thought it ought, invited my friends and family to sympathetic but unrestrained laughter.

I wish I had not made the mistake of waxing poetic on a final theology class exam. My professor, a brilliant, no-nonsense scholar whose real name I will refrain from using since I highly respect him, wrote at the top of my many pages of essay, “What happened to you?” He proceeded throughout the pages of my rambling thoughts to insist I had “not learned this” from him.

Whoa! What a mistake. I thought I faithfully wrote back what I learned form him but, after I swallowed the shocking  ‘D’ affixed to that final exam, and gave thanks for the ‘B’ on the course where ‘A’s once reigned, I began to laugh. After a day or two, I let others laugh with me. I wrote a whimsical poem to assuage the pain. It helps keep me laughing. 

-The Death of a 3.5 GPA-

Dr. Winston Master’s “D”

I got it.

By first-class mail it came to me.

I’m not convinced I earned the grade,

I know the effort I had made

To write a decent final.

But, Dr. Winston Master’s “D”

Reminded me that

Effort is not all that needs

To hit the desk

Of busy Educators;

Scholared, quick Evaluators

Of every student’s skill,

The work for Dr. Master’s desk

(In my case graded as a mess)

should be an echo of the best’

likethat of Dr. Winston Master.

My work must ring of scholarship

Should sound true tones of Mentor’s lips;

Must call to his precisioned mind

Those times he made all truth clear.

Oh dear! I wrote far too poetically,

My 3.5 is history,

I earned myself a shocking “D”

From Dr. Winston Master.

In answer to the disappointed professor, I do not know what happened to me on that test. I found my work less objectionable than did he. I justified for myself that its content did bob along somewhere between the banks of flowing historical accuracy. But, I admit, I wrote much too poetically, took too many liberties where my knowledge ran into unknown eddies, and obviously frustrated my most precise professor. In short, I made a terrible mistake. The resultant grade shredded my dream of scholarship, but in the long run, it made my seminary memory more colorful than expected. It made me laugh. 

So did an encounter with a fellow student at the Catalyst, the campus coffee shop. This time the mistake was his, but we shared the laugh. I stood waiting for coffee and suffering the effects of my Intensive Greek class. I felt ancient and stupid and sorry for myself, a normal attitude as I prepared for midterms. Who cares about cases, declensions, participles, forms, or agreeing endings. While I put in the fifty or so study hours it took each week to earn twelve units, my honestly-great instructor watched a whimsical PBS series by Douglas Adams. Each morning he faithfully opened class with an accurate report of the last night’s hilarious episode and asked the truly unfair question, “Did you watch?”

That was the state of things. Now, I stood waiting for coffee, trying to remember why I thought seminary was so wonderful when a man with whom I once shared a class struck up a conversation. Soon, apparently noticing a glint from my gesturing left hand, he said, “Oh no. You’re married.”To my wondering why that was a problem, she said, “I was going to ask you for a date.”

Well, hey! Thank goodness for life’s surprises. What a nice mistake. Actually, he was too young for me anyway and, sadly, too old for my ten single daughter. But he was just right for a moment that needed laughter. He was a good sport. We all make major and minor mistakes, but perhaps the biggest we make in all sorts of settings is that of not laughing soon enough. All people make mistakes. Real people have fun with them.

Coming up: Things Dear to Us are Worthy of Laughter

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